Representations of the World: Five Readings

All the textbooks studied in Chapters 3–7 want to offer students the possibilities of developing their knowledge about the target language countries (or, in the case of Esperanto, knowledge about the contexts in which Esperanto is used). They offer quite a lot of information on culture and society, and they are full of photos of people and places. But their representations of the world may be problematised in several respects, and the five culture-theoretical readings can help us formulate the problems.

The national studies reading shows that A Piece of Cake and Du bist dran both create hierarchies in their representations of the world in the sense that some countries or regions are apparently seen as irrelevant or less relevant even though they are target language countries. The two textbooks do this, of course, in very different world contexts: the English language has two dominating centres, the UK and the US, while the German language has only one dominating centre: Germany. But both create hierarchies also between those that are outside the centres: In A Piece of Cake, Canada comes first, then Ireland, Australia and South Africa, and India is mentioned in passing. A large number of countries are not mentioned at all. In Du bist dran, Austria comes before Switzerland. It should be emphasised that the textbooks cannot avoid some hierarchisation, but I find it important that they – the authors – explain their choices using academically sound arguments (it is not enough that they have been there themselves), and that they present their arguments not only to the teacher but also to the students, maybe in their first language or the language of schooling.

An aspect of the national studies reading is that the representation of the world not only includes the countries and regions in which the target language is spoken (as first, second or official language) but also other countries that are mentioned for one reason or another.